Mauro Campagnaro

Curated by spazioSERRA
Critical text by Carlo Fiorini

On display from 09/12/2021 to 06/01/2022
Opening Thursday 09/12/2021 at 19:00
Lancetti railway station, Milan, and online at www.spazioserra.org/residere

Mauro Campagnaro (Bassano del Grappa, Italy, 1977) graduated with a Master of Applied Art in graphics and photography at the Michele Fanoli State Institute of Art; he is currently enrolled in the Sculpture course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. He participated in the OAK- Organic Art Kernel artistic residency program (Rufina, Florence), exhibited at the Cercle des Artistes in Saint Paul de Vence in France and went for a short stay in southern Finland at the Taidekeskus Antares Art Center. In October 2018 he presented the installation (Prelude) Luce d’ombra inside Great War: an oblique look at the Ethnographic Museum of Valstagna. With the DAMP collective he won the Show and Tell contest of Arte Padova 2017. He exhibited at the 10th edition of Secret Traces of Memory for the Peace Project (Palazzo Ducale-Genova).

Carlo Fiorini (Bologna, Italy, 1966) dedicated himself to the relationship between art and new technologies, already in the early 90s. He investigated SciArt, the search for a language that, using the methods and technologies of scientific observation, is able (perhaps) to produce representations of the world linked not only to truth but also to aesthetics. This research led to the curation and realization of the exhibition U.Mano. Antiche misure nuove civiltà for the Arts and Sciences center of the Golinelli Foundation in Bologna. For two decades Fiorini has brought his search for a personal synthesis between tradition and innovation also in the practice of theater, with the design of sets and direction.

Residere

Residere is Mauro Campagnaro's digital and site-specific exhibition proposed within venerazioneMUTANTE, the exhibition season of spazioSERRA dedicated to the transformation of site-specific works during their permanence. The exhibition is visible from Thursday 9 December 2021 to Thursday 6 January 2022 in Lancetti railway station and on www.spazioserra.org.

Campagnaro's works are the poetic cataloging of the phases of a research. His aim is to tell the story and the spirit of places using objects and finds as talking elements of an ongoing story, authentic impressions of a relationship that lasts between matter and time, between natural space and human narrative. In the fragments and works that he presents, we can see the desire to restore, mend and strengthen a relationship, an animist relationship with nature, through languages and practices of the origins.

Residère: lat. stay, sit, hold back; root of the word resíduus: residue.

Residere investigates the presence of refuge areas for diversity. Carlo Fiorini writes in the critical text accompanying the exhibition: "Residere draws inspiration from the lesson of Gilles Clément, the planetary gardener, announced in his Manifesto of the Third Landscape, where he describes the indecisive fragment of the planetary garden made up of all the places abandoned by the man. Different sites for history and nature, with a common destiny of abandonment, which are essential, according to Clément, because they are places of biological creativity that are fundamental for the conservation of diversity. The places of abandonment become residues". Observing these places allows to create an inventory of the habitat, then of the inhabitants and finally also of the possible mutation models that are triggered.

Carlo Fiorini writes: "With adequate strategies to limit the influence of his presence, Mauro places in the residue a camera with sensors to monitor the habitat in flagrant mutation and the species that populate it. He produces 3,035 minutes of images and sounds, travels 306 km with 30,600 m of altitude difference on foot, from July 2020 to September 2021 he carries out 34 different monitoring sessions, thus revealing what one can see after stopping observing". The resulting videos populate spazioSERRA website and compose the cataloging of a mutation, the manifestation of a biological system full of unexpected events. This narration through images of a non-anthropized site, crossed by ecological corridors, communicates and contrasts with spazioSERRA, a place perfectly inserted in the metropolitan context, where journeys and movements are organized and repetitive.